DistributionWatch: SCO Linux 4--Ready for the Big Time - page 3

Down to Basics

January 13, 2003

By
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

To make SCO Linux 4 do its stuff, you'll need at least an
Intel 486, with 64MBs of RAM and 500 MBs of disk space to
give it a try. But, that's pointless. To do the jobs SCO Linux
4 is meant to do you'd need a minimum of a high-speed AMD
Athlon or Intel Xeon with 512MBs of RAM and 40GBs of hard
disk and up.

But, to really see UnitedLinux strut its stuff, with advanced
features like IBM's open source Memory
eXpansion Technology (MXT) and large memory support so
that even on Intel 32-bit architecture, UnitedLinux can address
up to 64GBs of RAM with up to 4GBs per process, you need high-end
servers with gigabytes of RAM and a Storage Area Network (SAN).

Since I don't have one of those in the office (darn it!),
I tested SCO Linux 4 on a HP Pavilion 512N with a 1.4Ghz AMD
Athlon XP processor with 512MBs of RAM and an 80GB hard drive.
By UnitedLinux standards, that's barely getting into second
gear.

Even so, some things quickly became apparent. One is that
SCO Linux 4 is easy-I mean fall off a log easy-to set up.
With more two decades of setting up server operating systems
under my belt, I've never seen one this easy to set up before.
In fact, I've found most desktop systems to be more difficult
to install.

In large part that was because SCO's Webmin and Usermin,
Web-based administration programs are very easy to use. We
also found, though, that YaST, the UnitedLinux default administration
suite, also worked well.

For fine-tuning, though, they weren't perfect. Both use KDE
3's built-in Web browser, Konqueror 3.03, for their interface.
And, I found that Konqueror consistently broke during some
setup installations. For example, it always broke during some
stages of setting up Samba, the Windows NT compatible file
server. I was able to get around this by using Samba's own
SWAT administration tool. From some early experiments with
Mozilla 1.01, the other supplied Web browser, it would appear
that it works more reliable with the Webmin and Usermin administration
tools.

While I didn't test performance as such, I did run some informal
tests of how fast it ran compared to Caldera's pre-UnitedLinux
Linux, OpenLinux 2.4. I found that on the exact same machine,
SCO Linux 4 and its applications ran faster.

And, for lack of a better term, it ran smoother than its
predecessor and other Linux distributions. There were fewer
glitches. Yes, Linux is more stable than its competitors,
but we all know programs that need fine-tuning before they
work well enough for business. Well, on SCO Linux 4, there
were simply fewer fit and polish problems.

That's pretty amazing for a 1.0 release. Of course, if you
look really closely, you can see a lot of bits and pieces
still labeled SuSE rather than SCO or UnitedLinux, but for
practical purposes of getting the job done, it runs remarkablly
well for a 1.0 release.

Still, nothing is perfect and neither is SCO Linux 4. The
biggest problem I found was that there is no graceful way
to upgrade from OpenLinux 2.3. In talking with SCO, I discovered
that it wasn't just my own klutziness getting in the way.
The only way to 'upgrade' OpenLinux, or any other Linux for
that matter, is to back up your data and configuration files
and restored them after letting SCO Linux 4 blow away the
existing Linux system. If you've invested a lot of time in
getting your Linux setup just so, be ready to re-do a lot
of it.

So, in short, if you're upgrading an existing business installation,
make sure you have up to the second backups and allow for
lots of time for bring the system back up to production level.
Otherwise, you're going to have one really ticked up client
on your hands.

UnitedLinux representatives tell me that upgrade paths from
older Linuxes will be made cleaner. But, with the possible
exception of SLES users, I doubt that will happen. By its
very nature UnitedLinux resets all those little, but vital,
Linux file placements and settings to one standard way. And,
that way, again with the exception of some of SuSE's Linuxes,
isn't the UnitedLinux way. In the future, however, one SCO
Linux 4 is in place upgrading SCO Linux Upgrade service, will
go much easier.